It's become a chicken/egg stalemate. No one is buying Macs to game, because there is no game development. There is no game development, because they're not going to spend that time/money on a platform where no one is gaming.
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The thrill of Apple silicon is already gone
- Thread starter sam_dean
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I do not believe so.
Among all platforms it has the slowest adoption.
Apple Silicon's over 2 years already but consumer perception of the Mac as a gaming platform to almost everyone that includes Mac users is comedic.
It would accelerate if Apple were to implement incentives to lower time, money and effort to port games.
Exclusive triple A titles are unlikely until the 2030s.
I think that Apple needs to do much more than Apple Arcade, they need to approach the big names like Acti-Bliz, EA, Ubisoft, and work with them (maybe with a financial incentive) to port their best games to run very well on Metal and AS. The hardware is there already. We really need software support.
Edit: And once they have a bunch of great AAA games they need to advertise a LOT.
The thrill of Apple silicon is already gone
The Mac's long-drawn-out switch from Intel has become more formulaic than fantastic.www.macworld.com
What the article failed to see is how big of a revolutionary change it was from Intel chip to Apple chip for the past 2+ years.
So I will list it down for you for your convenience
Even in 2023 Intel has not sold any product that uses a 5nm process while Apple's already internally prototyping TSMC's 3nm process for use with the iPhone 15 Pro in Sep 2023 with a possible 3nm M3 chip by as early as Oct/Nov 2023 or as late as Jan 2024.
- 2014-2020 14nm Intel chip (6 years) to Nov 2020-today 5nm Apple chip (2+ years)
- Intel with low performance IGP vs Apple with high performance dGPU as an IGP
- Intel chips with minority of ICs & functionality on chip that leads to latency increases and resources not being maximized to Apple chips with majority of ICs & functionality on chip so latency decreased and resources being maximized
- Intel chips being power hogs & heat generators like a wall-powered desktop to Apple chips being power sipping & barely warm like a battery powered smartphone
Apple leapfrogged Intel by 6 years of tech improvements and applying what Apple learned from smartphones into their laptops & desktops.
If you are concerned about efficiencies, performance per watt, power consumption and waste heat in your devices then you will buy Apple products.
If you are concerned about Windows programs, computer games & ease of repairs/upgrades then you will buy Intel/AMD products.
On my part I am jumping from a 2012 iMac 27" 22nm to a 2023 iMac 27" 5nm that I hope will be out by Jun 2023 during WWDC 2023.
What gets me excited from this upgrade isn't just the industrial design, raw performance and macOS Ventura that sings on Apple chips but the drop in power consumption from >200W to <100W for the same screen size but 2x the Retina resolution and less waste heat that adds load to my air-con that tries to maintain 24c.
It would have been awesome if the M2 family of chips was on 4nm or even 3nm but we will have to wait for the M3 for a 3nm chip.
I expect the performance to blow my mind.
Going forward Apple has leading die shrink process advantage over Intel/AMD/Qualcomm unless they fumble with the iPhone and cannot order out more than quarter billion iPhones chips annually.
What a dumb take in this article! I don't know about all this nanometer stuff. Setting all the tech aside, even my base model M1 MacBook Air runs absolute circles around the immediately previous i5 Air I had, while consuming ~1/3 as much power. The M1 iMac I use slows down for basically nothing I ever do and I've never heard the fans spin up audibly. So, yeah, if this counts as a "thrill" I'm still quite thrilled -- and I'm still just using 1st gen M1 Macs.
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Why not? I'd like to play a newer version of Freelancer/Wing Commander...
Yup, 500million in crowdfunding, the most literal case of big budget game there is (so far).
nanometer stuff has a great influence in power consumption, speed and heat.
I use it as a way to show the gap between Intel and Apple tech and how stagnant Intel was for 6 years that led to Apple leaving them. This forced them to be on 10nm by 2023.
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Because despite the money that has come in, we are now like 12 years on and it just doesn't seem like it will ever be finished. From the sounds of things it isn't well managed either. I don't want Apple throwing money at a project that might never come out at this point.
Wing Commander and Privateer were a big part of my childhood.
It amazes me that over 4 million people gave Chris Roberts over half a billion $ for a dozen years.
And yet it is still in beta! Are they planning to keep this running in beta after we go sub-1nm node?
I'd rather they buy Acti-Bliz, Ubisoft, Rockstar, or literally any other gaming company (even though all these other companies are more expensive)
Command-space (search), start typing “terminal”
People are used to using search to pull up apps these days
I was so hopeful I’d get the freelancer that the og game had the potential for, but star citizen really isnt managing to get there
Yeah, not the point. If you tell someone to pull up an app they usually dont go digging through folder structures no matter the app
You seem to have a talent on this thread for deliberately misconstruing people’s points, I don’t know if it’s intentional, but it definitely makes it hard to engage
As for use of a terminal: macbook pros have a *huge* presence in software dev, engineering, and related fields. Go to any major tech conference and at least half the laptops present are macs these days. A lot more people drop into a shell at least occasionally than you seem to think. And plenty of casual consumers do so to follow instructions on various sites for making tweaks.
So sure, folks like me who spend half their time in iterm2 arent the majority, but cli use in general is pretty high. Hell my wife, a teacher, was just showing me a new tool she installed to use in a class that she followed instructions to use brew to install dependencies. She was very proud, she hadnt heard of homebrew before, I think she was a bit disappointed that she found out I use it a lot and it’s one of the first things I drop onto a new machine of mine
I think we are not comparing apples to apples.
Widen your horizons. Do not look at it through a drinking straw.
I look at the whole user base in all sovereign nations and not just specific tech professionals like devs, engineers and related fields.
Your user base is the minority. To me that means less than 50% of all worldwide Mac users whether they be in the tech industry or not.
To be more accurate it would be significantly less than 20% of the more than 100 million Macs in use.
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Yeah, I get it and I understand the basic concept. But as an end user I don't care so much how the sausage is made ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ And as a Mac user since the 1990s, Apple Silicon has been hands down the best across the board hardware update I can remember. I'm still pretty thrilled with it every time I find I'm not looking at a beachball or wondering if I can eke more than 5 hours' use out of my MacBook (like I did with Mac Intel laptops).
Yes, it's gone, now we're looking at 10-15 years of incremental upgrades.
But that's ok. Insane jumps cannot happen every other year.
But that's ok. Insane jumps cannot happen every other year.
Again, you seem to have ignored half my post, go back and reread where I talked about how even casual users often follow instructions that drop them into the command line
As to the rest if you think this isnt important overall, or how much professionals use commandline tooling, look at how much work Microsoft has put in to the Linux subsystem for Windows or their continual expansion of powershell, it's not just Apple...
There are 25-30 million software developers in the world, according to various estimates. Apple's market share in >$1k laptops/desktops should be something like 50%. That suggests that at least 10% of Mac users are software developers. Then add other scientific/technical fields, people studying those fields, and other power users, and I would expect that at least 30% of Mac users could plausibly use the command line. That's a larger fraction than the creative professionals Macs have traditionally been associated with.
It's in the Applications folder in Utilities. Not exactly a deep folder structure. Would you also say that Disk Utility is hidden?